CHP market clusters

An analysis of the CHP market clusters include natural gas CHP, landfill and wastewater treatment, and natural gas non-CHP.

Christian Mueller and George Polson, MTU Onsite Energy

11/12/2013

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CHP market clusters

The four CHP market clusters include natural gas CHP, biogas, landfill and wastewater treatment, and natural gas non-CHP. The following paragraphs explain each cluster.

Natural gas CHP: This business cluster represents applications such as commercial buildings, industrial facilities, healthcare facilities, district heating, prisons, hotels, condominiums, apartments, and universities. The cluster also includes commercial complexes such as athletic clubs, shopping malls, and greenhouses. These facilities have a significant year-round demand for cooling/heating and electricity. Sizing of the installation is critical to allow for continuous operation. If further analysis is needed, the unique requirements of this cluster include:

Electrical and thermal loads of the facility—ideally by the hour based on historical data

Type of thermal load such as hot water, steam, or chilling with flow rates, pressure, and temperatures

The piping and instrumentation diagram of the facility’s existing thermal distribution system.

Biogas: This business cluster represents applications that use anaerobic digesters to produce biogas from dairy, livestock, and food waste. The focus is to provide energy from waste products. The emphasis is to reduce the amount of methane that escapes to the atmosphere because methane is a far worse greenhouse gas than CO2. Electricity is the main energy produced in this application—either for self-consumption or to feed to the grid. Biogas quality is critical to long unit life as sulfur (H2S) content in the fuel must be minimized. Unique requirements of this cluster include:

Consistency of waste stream and therefore consistency of gas quality

Thermal demand for heating of digester and facility

Gas analysis showing methane and H2S content.

Landfill and wastewater treatment: This business cluster represents a specialty segment that focuses on converting waste to energy to produce electricity for self-consumption or to feed to the grid. Gas quality is critical because the content of the raw material used to produce the gas may change continually. Gas composition must be monitored continuously for methane and siloxane content to provide quality gas for the module. Specific requirements of this cluster include:

Open or closed landfill

Age of landfill

Projection of future gas production from landfill

Gas analysis showing methane and siloxane content.

Natural gas non-CHP: This business cluster focuses on electrical production only. Typical applications include peaking plants, independent power producers, industrial facilities, and any other requirement for electric power generation. These applications provide independence from the grid. Electrical efficiency and total lifecycle cost are critical. The mode of operation can be either grid parallel and/or island. For island operation, the characteristics of the connected electrical loads must be analyzed. These characteristics include:

Description of connected loads in island operation

Connected load starting sequence.

Christian Mueller is a sales engineer at Tognum America Inc./MTU Onsite Energy. He began his career with the company in Australia in 2007 and later moved to the company headquarters in Augsburg, Germany. Mueller provides engineering support to the sales organization for customer-specific CHP installations. Since 2012, he has supported the MTU Onsite Energy CHP product portfolio in North America as a sales engineer based in Houston. Mueller has a diploma in industrial engineering with an emphasis in energy systems.

George Polson is a consultant for Tognum America Inc./MTU Onsite Energy where he co-leads the team to release continuous gas CHP products into North America. He retired from MTU Detroit Diesel as director of Sales Integration in 2009 after 40 years of service with the company. Polson began his career at Detroit Diesel conducting emission certification testing in the early days of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency program. He was also involved in product development, facility planning, application engineering, and program management. He spent more than 15 years supporting the off-highway business involved in engineering, customer support, and sales. Polson is a graduate mechanical engineer.

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